British and Wales Birth, Marriage and Death Certificate Document Fees Are Increasing Significantly on April 6, 2010

I want to make all of you aware of some recent news that has come to my attention from Paul Milner, one of our Genealogy Program speakers.

This is a very timely notice mainly geared to anyone that is doing British research.

Paul has indicated that fees to order key vital records data will be increasing significantly starting on April 6, 2010. All of the details are in the text sent to me by Paul. His text that came from his e-mail is in Italics in this post following my preface.

If you were planning on ordering any material for these British Vital Records, you may want to accelerate your order to take advantage of the still lower costs to do so. On April 6, 2010 the costs appear to be increasing by about 50%.

Read Paul’s text contained in this post and act now to save yourself some money.

Have you been putting off getting those birth, marriage and death certificates for your English and Welsh ancestors? Here is an incentive to motivate you. The British government announced March 1 that effective 6 April 2010 the cost of obtaining a certificate will increase from 7 pounds ($10.60 ) to 9.25 pounds ($14).

You can obtain any birth, marriage or death certificate for any event since 1 July 1837 in England and Wales. You don’t even have to prove a relationship to the person.

So how can you quickly do this? I would suggest the first place to start is FreeBMD at www.freebmd.org.uk. The big benefit here is that this is a computerized index of the entries in the national civil registration indexes. This pulls out all entries for a given name you are seeking, with options to limit the search parameters (time, location, etc). This index covers a lot of entries up into the 1930’s, the later in time period the less complete the coverage is so check the coverage statistics if you can’t find here what you are looking for. When you find what you are looking for confirm that the information given matches what is provided in the original index by viewing the digital scan of the index. If you make a mistake you won’t get the certificate you are seeking.

If you can’t find what you looking for here you can see digital scans of the pages from the national indexes at Ancestry –www.ancestry.comand at FindMyPast – www.findmypast.comBoth of these are subscription services provide access to the civil registration indexes. In addition they provide access to indexes and images for the 1841 through 1901 census returns. Additionally, FindMyPast is the only place you have access to the 1911 census. Using the census returns in conjunction with the civil registration records will help you expand the family information you have.

You will get your certificates back in about 10 days. So between now and April 6 you have time to order some certificates and get them back in time to order another batch, for you know each certificate will produce another lead to follow.

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